Video has certainly become a very important part of the Facebook experience. Brands, but also individuals, are now investing a significant amount of resources to produce content specifically for Facebook.

But here is the thing: the more popular a video becomes, the more people share it. And with this often comes the unpleasant experience for creators of seeing their content being shared without authorisation.

Facebook is now ready to help publishers protect their copyright. Much along the lines of what already exists on YouTube, Facebook is starting to use its new video-matching technology to help rights-owners protect the content they own.

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What Is Rights Manager?

Rights Manager enables you to:

– Easily upload and maintain a reference library of the video content that you want to monitor and protect. Publishers can upload content libraries and publish live video as a reference for Rights Manager to check against, including videos they are not sharing publicly on Facebook. Rights Manager then monitors for potential infringement of that content across Facebook.

– Create rules about how individual videos may be used. Publishers can set specific matching rules to either allow or report copies of their videos based on criteria of their choice — for example, how much content has been reused, where the matching video is located, or how many views the matching video has received.

– Identify new matches against protected content. Rights Manager’s dashboard surfaces any new matches against a publisher’s uploaded reference files and live video. On the dashboard, publishers can filter matches by time, date or view count, and then either report potential copyright infringement or allow the matching content to remain published.

– Whitelist specific Pages or profiles to allow them to use your copyrighted content. Publishers can specify Pages or profiles that have permission to publish their protected content without being monitored for potential infringement.

– Protect your reference library at scale with the new Rights Manager API. Facebook is rolling out an API for Rights Manager to improve bulk uploading for publishers, and to allow media management companies to support partners in managing, monitoring and protecting their content across Facebook. You can find out more about the Rights Manager API here.

Maybe a little more surprising, Rights Manager can also protect live video streams. When a user goes Live on Facebook, the store is checked against files that are referenced within the Rights Manager library. If the system can match your live stream to an existing recording, your live streaming will be immediately interrupted(although I’m not sure how a Live video could match an existing pre-recorded video…)